Indifference
by Dr. Abraxas
Summary: set years after the events of the series. Hojo and Souta meet again and re-establish a friendship. they seem to live very bleak and unfulfilled lives trapped in a city that ignores them. can they find happiness with each other?


A/N: this is it, my last official Inuyasha story. hope you enjoy!

**"Indifference" by Abraxas (2010-01-17)**

Later....

The rain splattered windows. The cool, autumn air seeped through doorways. Cramped, as it was, the commuters endured the discomfort but Hojo - at the center of the crowd - was chilled.

He turned up his collar. He dug into his pockets. Just to soothe the effects of the weather within that train. But it was impossible to escape the isolation he felt which seemed unnoticed by the others.

At the station the train hemorrhaged its passengers. Its doorways parted as a voice announced the stop. Hojo was pushed onto the platform as if sucked away by a tornado through the random shoving here and there of those who ignored he existed.

He could not recall what followed. He was trapped by a routine which was, fundamentally, forgettable. He knew only that eventually he reached the street where the crowd melted into the background of Tokyo.

Freed, superficially, he unfurled the umbrella and continued onward.

It was only three past noon yet everything was painted with the gray, abysmal shades of twilight. The street - wet. The road - dingy. Pools formed where drains clogged and reflected a dismal view of the city. And there was a curious smell - sharp, polluted - that clung onto the air unique to that rain. It was, strangely, intoxicating.

Why he kept that commute, coming and going day after day, he could not say. Loneliness, deepened by that day's weather, forced him to dredge what he rather suppress. Maybe it was to pretend he remained a part of the world mysterious and enigmatic as it was? Maybe it was to relive the memories of a past whose yearning, expectant lure trapped him within its embrace littered with false and broken promises?

Hojo stood at a corner of MacArthur and 32nd Street - the light was slow to change.

He spotted a teen at the end of the walkway. The youth's spiky, anime-like hair - washing from yellow to black - looked soggy against his scalp. His clothes, shredded denim and loose cotton, were not withstanding the weather.

He was unsettled to be that fascinated by a stranger. Especially a boy with the looks of a common Tokyo punk. The city was full of such youths - he knew that - but he could not contain the curiosity. Something about the face felt out of synch with the image conveyed by the body. Something, indistinct, seemed to make them kin on another level....

A familiarity....

"Souta?" his voice raced past his mind in which the connection was unformed. "Could it be Souta?"

The teen was surprised by the sound of the name and looked about to see who said it.

Hojo dropped the umbrella as he approached Souta. A moment of silence followed as the realization settled between them. They were not strangers, exactly. It was then that they smiled.

"Hojo-kun?" he asked just to be certain.

They bowed, rain bouncing off of their heads.

They paced under the hood of a bus-stop. The sounds of that city retreated into background. The stares of its people blurred into a sea of facelessness. Soon the world just went by ignoring they existed.

"Are you alone?" asked Hojo as he noticed Souta was not waiting to cross or board a bus.

"No, I mean, yes - it's complicated," he tried to explain.

"It's OK. Take it." He extended the offering - his folded, camouflaged-colored umbrella. It was ragged, aged. "I bet it looks better with you anyway."

Souta half-laughed. The youth reached toward the man. Their fingers almost met as Hojo's offering passed from hand to hand.

"Won't you need it?" Souta asked, looking, eye to eye, with Hojo.

"I live nearby," he said. "You look different. I guess it must be the time that passed."

"You look like I remember."

A Jeep pulled into the bus-stop.

Souta backed from the man to the vehicle.

"Yeah, I got to run, man."

Hojo nodded knowingly.

The Jeep was filled with hooligans. The passengers - a pair of youths styled and clothed like Souta - gazed out of the rear. The driver - sporting long, black hair bound by a band of leather - honked the horn. The teen jumped into the vehicle and the gang was off.

Later....

It was evening when Hojo stepped out of the building to check the mail. Another red 'final notice' alert was taped onto the box. He tore it and junked it. The rest of the mail followed.

Just as he was about to retreat into the bleak, abysmal interior he caught a glimpse of Souta. The teen was learning against a vehicle. It was not a Jeep.

The man waved with that informal, American fashion - learned by watching too many movies - and the youth replied mutely with but the eke of a smile.

"You keep weird hours," Souta said.

"Not everything it what it seems to be," Hojo said.

The boy's expression conveyed a sadness that appeared incompatible with what the rest of the body tied to say. Like the face the eyes simply belong to another. Perhaps the kid he used to know? Now, someway, somehow, trapped by the peripherals of a punk.

"You OK kid? You still look wet to me," he said jokingly.

A goofy smiled answered - and he enjoyed seeing that would-be yakuza face smile that way.

They ambled into a cafe and retreated through its maze of furniture. The light was dark except at the register and at the parts of the walls adorned by art. At the rear, where it was pitch like night, they sat by a window with a view of a courtyard.

They settled looking at each other askew and eye-to-eye intermittently. Movement was cloaked by shadow and darkness. Conversation faded, gradually, into silence.

"You can't imagine how often I was stood up, here, by a Higurashi." Hojo tapped his fingers against the table by his cup of tea. Grimacing. Frowning. He added: "Well, by _a_ Higurashi."

Souta swirled a spoon about his tea.

"How is Kagome-chan?" Hojo asked almost as afterthought.

Souta shook biting his lip while gazing into his tea. "I don't know." He shifted, visibly, uncomfortable. "It's been a long, long time since I've been gone. I don't keep track of history anymore."

Hojo sipped while working a calculation internally.

"You must be fifteen, sixteen, now," he concluded.

"Yeah." He leaned against the chair. "I don't live at home. I don't fit. Can't you see? What do you see?"

"The kid I used to know all growed up."

There was a genuine moment of vulnerability at work with Souta's smile. It was shy, almost, pained to be noticed. He looked down, away. Anything to avert attention.

Hojo reached out to Souta - hand met hand with a tight embrace of fingers - until contact withdrew mutually.

Gazing, as if talking to a table and not a man, Souta continued. "I - well - my sister always got the attention. She was different in a special and important kind of way that had to be protected." He folded his hands above his lap. "They didn't care. They didn't notice. Until Kagome left. Then when they looked at me they didn't like what they found. I wasn't what they wanted...."

Hojo studied the youth as intently as possible. Given the teen's clothing it was possible to see the skin around the shoulders and chest. He could not spot a marking. Perhaps he was free of the yakuza. Or. Perhaps it was only a matter of time until tattoo etched transience into permanence. With the people he went with....

Hojo sighed letting his eyes explore that which was exposed of Souta's skin. Blinking out of it he sipped his cup of tea.

Souta noticed Hojo's blush but pretended not to see it.

"Why'd you ask about Kagome?"

Hojo sighed and paused a breath to think - to search words that explained the indescribable.

"Habit?" He swirled a spoon through his cup of tea. "It was always a strange, relationship, if it could be called that. I was unusually popular especially with girls - although I never got to experience the benefits of it - I gravitated toward Kagome though. I think, in the back of my head, I knew she was going to be unreachable. But it was a chance to appear normal. It's all I ever wanted to be. Normal. It's funny - how we do things without knowing why. Anyway, she kept getting sick that year - I hope that's not why -"

Souta was about to speak but stopped.

"Where do you live?"

"With friends, outsiders."

"Souta, if you -"

Souta clutched Hojo's hand; tugged it, released it.

"You gonna stand me up too?"

Later....

The train sped above while below the crowd thickened.

Hojo held onto his collar defiantly against windswept, stormy streets, shivering through that increasingly wintery climate. It was getting darker and darker each day as the year was coming to its end.

The rain, though, seemed out of place that season....

The routine back and forth through Tokyo, that echo of life still fresh as if new, its call was too hard to ignore. Since Souta, though, he question the motivation of that farce. Who was he trying to impress? To fool? He was an adult without any expectation to reach but that which he wanted. Yet he went about clinging onto everything about a life he hated only because it was everything he used to know.

He needed to break free....

All of a sudden an umbrella unfurled - it was Souta dripping while holding it.

"Want to see a movie with me?" the teen asked.

The man said yes.

They trekked alleys, dodging pedestrians and vehicles, ambling through a world parallel yet alien to the Tokyo of tourists. They ventured into smokey, hazy streets where buildings were so tall and clustered it looked like night blanketed the city. It continued to rain only instead of torrent it was drop by drop as the buildings also blocked a lot of the water.

Souta showed Hojo a place the adult would not have realized existed despite many lonely journeys through the city. True, he wandered, often he failed to look through the obvious. So lost to thought in attempts to be like everyone that failed to see reality.

It was along a quiet backwater street. There, nestled between storefronts, was a building wide enough only to accommodate a window and door side by side. The establishment itself was unmarked and appeared to be foreclosed.

He wondered if it might have been an invite to watch a film at a house Souta crashed. When he entered, though, he discovered a very different situation. The facade it seemed was what remained of an old movie house's entrance. The interior was modified by fence and bar in a fashion similar to a prison.

An attendant behind glass exchanged money and tickets. A couple of bouncers - punks who looked familiar - admitted them through the gate. Beyond it was a corridor out of which echoed the frenzy jungle of music. What used to be a lobby was filled with smoke and neon. And a throng of people enjoying the night.

Souta led Hojo by the elbow toward the rear where steps split to the top, to the bottom - they climbed into a hallway as murky as the rest of the establishment.

Three wide entrances revealed a theater. A film was already playing. It was a John Wayne classic approaching its climax.

"It's the next movie we need to watch," Souta said under a doorway.

Hojo looked about the theater - the light of the movie revealed the balcony to be deserted except at a few spots.

"It's great to be in the dark like this," he whispered while credits rolled. "It's like we forget everything. Even who we are. And pretend we are anything we want to be."

A new title appeared - "Do You Dream of Western Love?"

Hojo chuckled - it was a bootleg crudely subbed.

Later....

It was pitch when the credits rolled. Hojo noticed Souta wiping a tear but pretended not to see it. Outside the night veiled the red of the eyes like denial. They walked the streets behind a crowd that, soon, dematerialized. They continued as if lost although it was that they did not care.

For a while they were quiet.

"Love is a terrible thing. A dangerous thing. Don't you think, Hojo?"

"What makes you say that, Souta?"

Hojo's hand pressed onto Souta's shoulder and squeezed - feeling an inch of skin and withdrawing as if shocked by electricity.

"Don't you know? You got to know! You fell in love with a woman like my sister...."

Hojo's fingers spread about Souta's collar and tapped - not a hint of awkwardness followed that contact.

"It wasn't that. No. It wasn't love."

Souta shook and latched onto Hojo's waist.

"I'm scared to be alone, yet, I'm afraid of love too. I want both. I want none. I - I just don't want to be hurt the way I was when left. It's worse than pain."

"I -"

Hojo's voice was silenced by Souta's kiss.

It started as a simple brush of lips that elongated with nervous, gentle pecking then stopped as tongues touched....

At the very last moment Souta broke the embrace then fled into the night.

"No, wait...wait...wait, Souta...."

The boy who came out of the street returned into its shadow and darkness and vanished.

He sighed, defeated, and wandered through oblivion until he reached the apartment again.

Later....

Hojo sat through a dubbing of a Korean B movie.

It was routine - the obscure establishment, the invisible patrons, the theater and its suggestions of new and different lives. Gone were the aimless rides to haunts filled with the carnage of long, lost dreams. Forgotten was that pain of fitting into what used to be important....

That was then. This was now.

He patrolled the streets of Tokyo like an exiled. He eked a living among the overlooked. All the while he searched.... For youths with a spiky mohawk. For umbrellas with its camouflaged color. Souta was there, surely, watching, waiting....

A film unspooled. Its intrusion was matched by a shock felt as a body dropped into a seat nearby. A wet, denim-clad arm wrapped around his shoulder. He groped the arm through the canvas as he pressed its cuff against his lips. The odor of rain was real....

"I wanted to be normal." Hojo kissed Souta where rain dewed clean shaven skin. "I didn't think I was but I was...."

Souta smiled and Hojo smiled too.

**END**


End file.
